Otros Saberes 1

1
Introduction
Charles R. Hale and Lynn Stephen
History of the Initiative

Latin American studies as an integral and fully recognized field of scholarly
inquiry exists only for those accustomed to viewing the region from north of
the US-Mexican border. Although never completely stable or uncontested,
Latin American studies had its first heyday between the mid-1960s and late
1980s, at the height of the Cold War, when the region became the focus of
intense geopolitical contention. This in turn lent an added urgency to the
northern universities mandate to give special priority to research, graduate student training, and undergraduate teaching on Latin America. From
a sociology of knowledge perspective, it is perhaps less important to distinguish the progressive or anti-establishment currents of this scholarship from those uncritically aligned with the imperial designs of the United
States and its allies. Despite their profound differences in perspective and
substance, those at both poles (and most shades of gray in between) shared
key premises that constituted their subject of study. When serious challenges
emerged in the 1990s, especially from quantitative comparativist scholars
who cast doubt on the viability of Latin American studiestoo particularistic, no theoretical promise, and so onmany of these area studies stalwarts
set aside their differences in defense of their field.
While two decades later it is clear that Latin American studies has
remained vibrant in the face of such challenges, in our view its resilience
is due to innovation, rather than to a merely reactive defense of deeply
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ingrained premises and institutional practices.1 Roughly parallel to the dissent from comparativists working on a large scale, a completely distinct current of critique and reformulation came from the margins within US society
and its academic institutions and from Latin America. While for a time, the
combination of these multiple and diverse criticisms produced a general
atmosphere of embattlement and concerns that the field would buckle under
in the face of such widespread questioning, we now can see that such pessimism was unwarranted. Moreover, continued and renewed vibrancy has
come at a time, especially since September 2001, when the geopolitical attention of the United States and its allies has turned sharply away from Latin
America toward other parts of the world and when financial times for university-based scholarship have not been especially good. The principal reason
for this achievement, we contend, is the strong inclination to innovate, to
rethink ingrained premises and received wisdom, to move from critique to
reformulation. In this case the old adage has proven to be accurate: change is
a source of strength.
The Latin American Studies Association (LASA) exemplifies this selffortifying innovation and, given its prominence, LASA also has played a
key role in producing the effects that we now observe more generally in the
field. Three dimensions of critique and reformulation have been especially
important, all of which directly engage the premises that constituted Latin
American studies as a field in the previous era. The first of these premises is
the southward gaze: the idea that Latin America has been constituted as a
region, and therefore as a field of study, by scholars and practitioners situated in the North, such that research and teaching, however progressive or
well intentioned, reinforces the power inequities associated with the broader
geopolitical relations. The key innovation in this realm has been the gradual
displacement of the us-studying-them framework with the principle of
horizontal collaboration, whereby knowledge about Latin America is produced through power-sensitive dialogue among diversely positioned scholars, both in the North and in the South.
The second critique focuses on the elite and nation-statecentric frame
of Latin American studies, which has highlighted certain topics and perspectives while rendering others largely invisible. The reformulation here (not
just in Latin American studies but in the humanities and social sciences at
large) has been toward increasing recognition of the multiple axes of inequity
that cross cut Latin American societies and that tend to be naturalized if they
are not subject to sustained analytical scrutiny.2 Latin American studies has
been revitalized, for example, by the increasing prominence of topics situated
at the bottom, and at the margins of socio-economic hierarchies. In many

casesthe study of indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples is one prime

examplethis also has involved a gradually increasing presence of intellectuals from these subaltern groups, which has added further vitality and innovation to the scholarship.
The third critique set its sights on the tenacious premises that underlie
the scholarly keywords objectivity and, in some circles, positivism. The
idea here is that the production of scholarly knowledge depends on a sharp
separation between scholar and objects of study and on the preservation of
a neutral or value-free space from which research and knowledge production activities are carried forward, unperturbed by political-ideological influence and unaffected by the pervasive power inequities in the world outside
academia. This position has been challenged simultaneously from a number of quarters, including post-structural theorists, institutional sociologists,
historians of science, and in a more commonsense vein, those academics
who modestly acknowledge that practitioners of various sortsactivists,
nongovernmental organization (NGO) staffers, government analysts, organic
intellectuals, and the likeoften have deeper and more accurate knowledge
about their preferred research topic than they do.
The Otros Saberes Initiative, conceived as a LASA project in 2004,
embodies and contributes to each of these three critical reformulations, especially the third. The central objective of the Initiative from its inception has
been twofold: to promote collaborative research between civil society and
academy-based intellectuals focused on research topics of interest to both,
giving priority to topics to which the civil society organizations in question
assign special importance; and to increase the presence of civil societybased
intellectuals at the LASA Congress and in LASA networks, so that they may
benefit from the flow of scholarly exchange in these activities, as well as enrich
LASA with their presence. Lengthy discussions with Milagros Pereyra-Rojas,
Sonia Alvarez, Kevin Healy, Kimberly Theidon, Deborah Barry, and David
Mhyre, among many others, as well as constructive deliberations in the LASA
Executive Committee (EC), yielded a proposal, which the EC then endorsed
and funded with a seed grant of twenty thousand dollars. In part due to the
particular interests and commitments of the founders with indigenous and
Afro-descendant peoples, and in part due to these peoples strategic importance to the critical reformulations mentioned above, we decided to make
them the focus of the first phase. The proposal struck a chord with three
institutions that historically have been strong supporters of LASAFord
Foundation, Open Society Institute, and the Inter-American Foundation
all of whom expressed particular enthusiasm for the conceptual innovation
that the Otros Saberes Initiative embodied. With support from each of them
Introduction
as well as from Harvard University,3 by the beginning of 2006 we had raised

enough to fund the full array of proposed activities for six research teams.
The Call for Proposals for the first round of the Otros Saberes Initiative
tapped an abundant vein of existing work that fit the programs requirements,
and inspired many others to conceive and propose new research collaborations. The LASA Secretariat received an overwhelming 175 applications, from
more than a dozen countries. The six-member Selection Committee, with a
composition that mirrored the collaborative character of the Initiative, met in
Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the campus of the School for Advanced Research, to
choose the six most exciting and deserving proposals.4 The Initiative also provided for the recruitment of two methodology consultants, with ample experience in collaborative research methods with indigenous and Afro-descendant
peoples. We were very fortunate that Professors Keisha-Kahn Y. Perry (Brown)
and Joanne Rappaport (Georgetown) accepted our offer to serve in this role.
Perry and Rappaport visited each team in the site where the research was
underway to learn from and to document the collaborative methods being
used and to offer advice when appropriate. The results of these rewarding and
challenging visits and their aftermath are presented in the co-authored chapter
that follows this introduction. One of the first products of these interactions
was a change in the designation of their role within the Initiative; Perry and
Rappaport became investigadoras solidarias (researchers in solidarity) rather
than methodology consultants, at the request of the research teams and
in keeping with the collaborative principle of the Initiative. These methodological issueshow to do collaborative research, what tensions or obstacles
emerge in the process, and how they are confrontedalongside the series of
substantive findings that each team brought to the fore, formed the agenda
for the two-day workshop that followed the LASA Congress in September
2007. After that workshop, the teams returned home with the mandate to
revise their reports to incorporate feedback received at the Congress and to
begin work on their final reports to be posted on the LASA website and the
academic articles that form the six central chapters of this book.
In the remainder of this introductory chapter we set out to accomplish
four objectives, unified by a central argument. First, we summarize the
research findings, paying attention both to the specifics of each project and
to the comparative insights gained from asking parallel questions in distinct
locations. Especially important in this comparative reflection is the decision,
both conceptual and political, to view indigenous and Afro-descendant issues
through the same analytical lens. Second, we address the methodological
counterpart to the substantive findings: summarizing the contributions of
this book to ongoing discussions about how to conceive and implement

collaborative research methods. A more elaborated version of this discussion

can be found in the next chapter, written by Perry and Rappaport. Next, we
take on the thorny question of validation of the results: Do collaborative
methods bring to the fore new and different ways of validating our research
findings? If so, what implications follow? Fourth and finally, we review the
impact of this research beyond the academy, considering contributions and
influences that would not be readily recognized in the academic realm.
Our argument, in summary, is that the research funded by the first round
of the Otros Saberes Initiative has made a series of critical contributions to
the interdisciplinary fields of indigenous and African Diaspora studies, and
to the interdisciplinary methodological discussion of collaborative research.
The results of this research did achieve a direct political impact as well,
helping the civil society organizations to advance specific goals, whether
empowerment through cultural/identity affirmation, documentation of rights
claims, or confronting internal organizational challenges. However, for the
purposes of this book and of the ongoing discussion about the Otros Saberes
Initiative within LASA, we have chosen to frame the principal contributions
in scholarly terms: new knowledge about the character of indigenous and
Afro-descendant struggles for empowerment; new theoretical insights about
race, gender, identity, and political activism; and a pointed series of interventions in the discussion about the practice of collaborative research. The future
of the Otros Saberes Initiative depends on the reception and appreciation of
these contributions among various sectors of the Americas-wide academic
community, not because the political contributions of the work are unimportant or insignificant, but because if Otros Saberes is to persist within LASA,
the scholarly contributions must carry the day. In a different forum, devoted
to the crucial political challenges of indigenous and Afro-descendant movements in the Americas, we hope and expect that this collaborative research
can also receive careful scrutiny and critical evaluation.
Findings
The six research projects that form the core of Otros Saberes bring together
a diverse group of Afro-descendant and indigenous collaborations with academics that resulted not only in rich findings from each individual project,
but also in many interesting points of comparison. Here we first explain the
key analytical questions and findings of each project and then discuss their
comparative insights. The focus of each research project is driven by a strategic priority in the life of the community, organization, or social movement
concerned.
Introduction
Specific Findings
The Frente Indgena de Organizaciones Binacionales (FIOB, Binational Front
of Indigenous Organizations), Colegio de la Frontera Norte (COLEF), and
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) research team focused on the
key resources that the FIOB has for developing gender and generational equity
in its leadership, as well as obstacles to these efforts. The FIOB is a transnational indigenous organization founded in 1992 that has three regional
areas of focus: the state of California in the United States, the states of Alta
and Baja California in northern Mexico, and Oaxaca in southern Mexico.
The organization primarily includes indigenous individuals, communities,
and organizations who identify ethnically as Zapotec, Triqui, Mixteco, Mixe,
and Puhrpecha, as well as some who identify now as Mexican American,
Chicano, and mestizo and share a common recognition of their indigenous
roots. With offices in three Mexican cities and several more in the state
of California, FIOB began as an organization led primarily by Mixtec and
Zapotec men but has become a much broader organization, with women
now a majority in its base membership. The organization has also seen a slow
diversification of its regional and transnational leadership to include women
and youth. For their Otros Saberes research project, the FIOB research team
carried out a series of workshops, interviews, and focus groups to understand
the obstacles to better supporting and developing women and youth as a part
of their leadership structure.
The research team found two types of leadership within the structure of
the organization. They called the first political leadership, which refers to
the charismatic leader who is often a public spokesperson and who knows
how to function not only in the movement but also more broadly, relating to
political parties, elected officials, and those in other social movements and
organizations. The second type is communitarian leadership, exhibited by
those who have a high level of knowledge about local issues, have strong networks of people at the local level, and can mobilize these networks for a wide
range of purposes. Although it is often assumed that these types of leadership
are genderedwith men serving as political leaders and women serving as
communitarian leadersthe research team found that there are women who
are political leaders and some men, particularly in Juxtlahuaca, Oaxaca, who
are communitarian leaders. The central challenge for the organization is to
integrate these two types of leadership and train young people, women, and
men in both types.
Apart from identifying different models of leadership, the research team
also uncovered convincing evidence of how ethnic and gender discrimination
that operates outside of the organization and in the daily lives of men and
6

women affects the internal life of FIOB. External expectations that require
women to spend a great deal of time preparing meals, taking care of children,
running their households, and engaging in a wide range of caring work
limit the time, energy, and mobility that women have to invest in the organization, particularly in a leadership capacity outside of their local communities. The fact that fewer women than men do travel to other communities and
participate in non-local activities also limits their opportunities to learn how
to function in wider political forums, to speak publicly outside of their community, and to feel confident in communicating with a wide range of people.
One of the resources that the research team found that women had as communitarian leaders was that they tended to introduce a wider range of topics
and questions into organizational discussions. This contrasted with higherup charismatic male political leaders who often are accustomed to speaking
only with other leaders and may not hear topics that are not introduced
through the higher-level leadership.
The founding generation of FIOBs leadership is primarily men above
the age of forty, some of whom are actively working to bring in youth and
women to a wide range of leadership venues. The research team found that
the FIOB was most successful in bringing in youth to the organizationparticularly those born in the United Statesthrough cultural activities such as
soccer tournaments and through the annual folk festival of music, food, and
dances known as the Guelaguetza. Regional differences, even among people
from the same ethnic group, can also be important factors in the particulars
of gender and generational inequality in the organization. In sum, the team
found that gender roles and expectations outside of the organization had a
major impact, much greater than on men, on how women could participate
within the organization.
The Proceso de Comunidades Negras (the Black Communities Process,
PCN) and Universidad del Valle, Cali (University of the Valley, Cali), of
Colombia focused their research on the ongoing challenge of making the
Afro-descendant presence in Colombia visible, counted, and influential in
public policy. The PCN is a national Afro-Colombian political organization
that includes 120 cultural groups, community councils, and urban and rural
collectives who together seek to gain rights for black communities. When
their struggle began in the mid-1990s, the PCN focused much of their effort
on demarcating and titling ancestral Afro-Colombian lands. This priority was
in response to a change in the Colombian Constitution and the Ley 70 that
granted indigenous peoples and Afro-descendant peoples the right to establish collective ownership of traditional Pacific coastal territories. As a result
of intense organizing efforts, the PCN and their allies were able to title five
million hectares of land as the collective territories of black communities.
Introduction
As a follow-up to their land-titling work, the PCN made a strategic decision to push the National Department of Statistics (DANE) in Colombia to
greatly improve their system for categorizing and counting Afro-Colombians
in the 2005 census. The Otros Saberes research team led by PCN carried out
an analysis of the 2005 census count of Afro-Colombians as one of three foci
of their investigation.5
The PCN research team found that past Colombian censuses during both
the colonial and republic periods laid the foundation for the invisibility of
Colombias Afro-descendant population. The first census of 1758 in Colombia
was created to diminish ethnic specificity and to begin to promote the idea
of universal subjects who later became citizens. By the time that Colombia
became an independent nation in 1819, blackness had been almost completely
erased from official records. From 1905 to 1995, there were ten censuses
conducted and only two used terms related to blacks. This had a significant
effect on how people responded to the census categories of Negro (black) and
Afrodescendiente (Afro-descendant) in the twentieth century and beyond.
The PCNs research on how the 2005 census was structured, which terms
were included, and how it was administered revealed that although the state
had made more concerted efforts to implement the self-identification principle to include more Afro-descendant categories and to include more people,
there was a serious undercount that effectively eliminated from 8 to 10 percent of the Afro-Colombian population. In 2004, the PCN and other groups
carried out workshops in which they solicited a wide range of terms of selfidentification used by Afro-Colombians including Trigueo, Moreno, Mulato,
Zambo, Afrocolombiano, Afrodescendiente, Raizal, Palenquero, Negro, Indgena,
Gitano (Rom o Li), and Blanco. Originally the DANE excluded the category of
Trigueo on the census form, but ultimately it yielded to pressure from the
PCN and others and included it in the 2005 census.
After the 2005 census was carried out, the results revealed that 10.5
percent of Colombians identified as Negro (or a related term), as opposed to
the 1.5 percent count generated by the 1993 census. Although the figure of
10.5 percent was higher, PCN activists felt that it still represented a very significant undercount in comparison with other statistics such as the figure of
26 percent cited in the 1998 National Plan for the Development of the AfroColombian Population. This figure was the result of estimates made by AfroColombian organizations based on their knowledge of the Afro-descendant
population in the municipalities where they worked, not a statistical survey. The PCN team then carried out their own research on who had actually
been asked the ethnic self-identification question on the 2005 census where
they could self-identity as black. The research team administered their own
questionnaire to 1,429 households in 2006 in the cities with the highest
8

levels of Afro-Colombian populationBogota, Medellin, Cali, Cartagena,

and Barranquilla. Overall they found that 42 percent of the people surveyed
in these cities were not asked the ethnic self-identification question by census
takers. The reasons given for non-use of this question varied: some census
takers apparently decided for themselves what peoples ethnicities were and
simply filled in the information; in other cases, they simply refused to ask the
self-identification question at all. After analyzing the results of their survey
of the undercount, PCN researchers estimated that about 18 to 20 percent
of the national population is Afro-Colombian. This would rank Colombia
as number two after Brazil as the country with the largest Afro-descendant
population in Latin America.
Both the official 2005 census and the PCNs own survey revealed that the
Afro-Colombian population has become increasingly urbanized. This process
has been greatly accelerated by the war in Colombia, which has as its epicenters the Pacific Coast of Colombia and Buenaventura, two of the principal
locations of Afro-Colombians. Driven out by the combined pressure of paramilitaries, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC) guerillas, drug traffickers, and the
Colombian army, many formerly rural Afro-Colombian communities have
become urbanized, leaving behind their territories for others who arrive to
stake claims. It is crucial for the PCN to document the increasing urban AfroColombian population as it fights for the rights of Afro-Colombians outside
of their rural locations and raises a national awareness of the poverty, hunger,
and lack of social services that afflict black people in Colombias cities.
Puerto Rican Testimonials: An Oral History Project in the East of Puerto Rico
(University of Puerto Rico-Mayagez) and community leaders from the western towns of Aguadilla and Hormigueros brought together a group of academics, students, and community leaders to use oral history and testimony
to document the multiple dimensions of AfroPuerto Rican identity and to
contest the Puerto Rican myth of racial democracy. The research team worked
in a national context where Afro-descendant Puerto Ricans are assumed either
to be a part of the past and linked to colonialism or to exist in the present in
extremely stereotyped and folklorized forms that focus only on music, dance,
and food. The researchers hoped to break blackness out of the representational cages of colonialism and folklore to demonstrate the historical continuity and presence of Afro-descendants in culture, politics, and other venues of
Puerto Rican life. A second goal was to show how AfroPuerto Rican identity
was developed, how different elements of it moved around the island, and
how it was affected by the different locations it was and is practiced in.
By interviewing dozens of community members in two distinct locations
Aguadilla, where black identity is clearly articulated, and Hormigueros,
Introduction
where blackness was believed to be confined to the population that worked

in a sugar refineryresearchers sought to document the diverse and conflicting experiences of Afro-descendants in Puerto Rico. Their oral histories
revealed three major ruptures of the national narratives of blackness in Puerto
Rico. First, they found that most of their narrators who provided testimonies
assumed the role of negro (black) in the interviews. The way that negro was
represented came from a wide range of non-white categories such as prieto,
negrito, de color, and trigueosimilar to some of the terms found by the
PCN in Colombia. Although researchers thought most interviewees would
not identify as black, almost all did in some way.
Secondly, the researchers found that the method of open-ended oral histories permitted those giving testimonials to engage in a critical reinterpretation
and negotiation about the meanings of being Puerto Rican. It also allowed many
people to reflect on the lived experience of discrimination, marginality, selfnegation, self-affirmation, and whitening that was a part of their understanding
of blackness. The dialogue promoted in the interviews allowed for a critical discussion of what racial identities in Puerto Rico mean today, what they meant in
the past, and how they have changed through time. A third rupture in national
narratives that occurred in the project was that the oral histories revealed the
complexities, conflicts, and continuous strategies that contemporary Afro
Puerto Ricans develop to confront the ideology of racial democracy within
the Puerto Rican national identity. Using oral histories as a method permitted
the researchers to see how these strategies work at the local level.
Mujeres de la Tercera Edad Manos Unidos en el Valle del Chota, las
comunidades de Comuna Ro Santiago Cayapas en Esmeraldas y el Fondo
Documental Afro-Andino de la Universidad Andina Simn Bolvar (Women
Elders with United Hands of the Valley of Chota, the communities of Comuna
Ro Santiago Cayapas in Esmeraldas, and the Afro-Andino Documentary Fund
of the Andean University Simn Bolvar), came together to generate knowledge and systems of organizing knowledge that stem from what people know,
learn, and teach through their daily lives. Such knowledge, they found, is
bound up in understandings of territory, religion, cosmovisin (world-view),
conceptions of nature, and social experience. By taking a holistic and horizontal approach to cultural knowledgequestioning the sharp distinction
between experts and practitionersresearchers found, for example, that
knowledge such as specific prayers and the invocation of saints and virgins
for curing purposes which might be excluded in academically based studies of medicine are central to Afro-descendant systems of knowledge about
health. Through a focus on knowledge linked through symbolism to territory,
plants, and cosmovisin, this research team identified two primary areas of
knowledge that are the focus of their analysis.
10

First, using birth as an entryway for understanding life, the research team
focused part of its effort on documenting the art of midwifery. This form of
knowledge is learned with practice from being a mother, an aunt, a grandmother, or a midwife and involves multiple techniques including massages,
baths, prayers, and symbolic systems. The midwives locate the mother, the
child, and the particular circumstances of each birth in a symbolic system,
which in turn becomes the focus of their diagnostic analysis. The midwife
and others assisting the birth also work to ensure that the proper conditions
accompany the birth. For example, there cannot be a drinking glass turned
upside down, a bucket face down, or a door or a window closed, as all must
be open at the time of the birth. A particularly important part of midwifery
is the art of cutting and curing the umbilical cord. The umbilical cord can be
cured with a variety of elements that are related to the kind of person that
the baby will become. There is transference of the traits of a particular plant
to the child, instilling vigor and force and reinforcing personality traits such
as courage or timidity. Most of these practices are deeply gendered. There are
particular plants used for curing baby girls umbilical cords and others for
boys. The substance used for girls will promote knowledge of plants and of
curing, for example.
A second focus of the research team was specific curative practices related
to mal de ojo (evil eye), mal aire (bad air/spirit), and espanto (fright). These
diseases are all cured with prayers, medicinal plants, and holy water. Medical/
religious practices such as these are taught by oral transmission and observation, by watching elders, and through firsthand experiences with diseases.
Researchers concluded that like birth, illnesses are points of negotiation, of
learning about forces outside of and inside of the body, of understanding
what the spaces of entry and exit are into and out of the human world.
Because the type of knowledge documented in this project emerges
through everyday life, is bound up with elders as knowledge authorities,
and is woven into the horizontal aspects of human relationships, the team
relied on a methodology that could first identify some of the most important
moments of connection between the human and natural world. The project
team then proceeded to map out this knowledge. Using the concept of social
mapping, the research team first worked with participants to draw their territories and within them to outline the different kinds of knowledge that exist,
the spaces for their production, the specific material and relational elements
they contain, and the persons who reproduce them. Elders, adults, and children shared experiences, and from those discussions maps were drawn. For
example, maps were drawn of different kinds of medicinal plants, where
they grow, their characteristics as hot and cold, and how they can be used.
Medicinal recipes were also shared and remembered. After the maps were
Introduction
11
drawn, people talked about them and then walked together to the points
on the map. In situ, in particular locations of rivers, gardens, houses, cemeteries, the maps were remembered, discussed, and shared. In this process,
intergenerational learning took place that not only documented but transmitted knowledge. The research teams then recorded the information in pamphlets, photographs, video, and audio to share widely in the communities. By
producing knowledge in a model that situates elders as knowledge experts,
draws widely on many peoples understanding, and then shares the knowledge in collective, intergenerational contexts, the research team believes that
this process can begin to decolonize knowledge about Afro-descendant peoples and validate this knowledge within their communities.
Comunidad Indgena Miskitu de Tuara y la Universidad de las Regiones
Autnomas de la Costa Caribe Nicaragense (URACCAN) (Indigenous
Miskitu Community of Tuara and the University of Autonomous Regions of
the Nicaraguan Caribbean Coast) worked together to map, claim, and facilitate the restoration of the territory of the Miskitu Indian community of Tuara
in the Atlantic coastal region of Nicaragua, which was first formed between
1913 and 1920. A Tuara community leader marked out and mapped Tuara
territory in 1958 together with the leader of one of many boundary communities. He turned in this information and received a title from the National
Agrarian Institute in 1958. This process was carried out without the approval
of many other neighboring communities, which produced a complex situation in 2006 when Tuara community members decided to reclaim and remap
their 1950s territory.
After the Sandinistas took power in Nicaragua in 1979, they initially
demonstrated sympathy toward Miskitu and other indigenous land claims
that were cancelled in the 1960s. A 1981 document from the Nicaraguan
Institute for Natural Resources and the Environment (IRENA, Instituto
Nicaragense de Recursos Naturales y del Ambiente) notes that Tuara
occupied 1,500 hectares, an area that overlaps with the lands of another
community. In 1987, Law 28 of the Autonomy of Indigenous Peoples and
Communities of the Atlantic Coast defined the rights and obligations of the
regional autonomous governments of the coastal peoples who inhabit the
Autonomous Region of the North Atlantic (RAAN). In 2003, the passing of
the Law of the Communal Property Regimen of the Lands of Indigenous
Peoples and Ethnic Communities of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua and of
the Coco, Bocay, Indio, and Maz Rivers (Law 445) formalized and provided
political impetus for communities like Tuara to map, measure, and title their
territories. In 2005, community members of Tuara together with URACCAN
representatives discussed the possibility of mapping and titling Tuara lands.
The community of Tuara chose community representatives and discussed
12

the project in a meeting presided over by community authorities, religious

leaders, elders, and teachers. They then carried out a series of workshops
that revealed, among other things, that many people had no knowledge of
the actual physical location or perimeter of Tuara territory. The combined
research team of community representatives and URACCAN investigators
designed a project that included exploring social and environmental relations, historical and legal history, and a cartographic and demographic analysis that would develop information and a collective conceptual basis for
defining the territory traditionally occupied by Tuara.
Using a process of ethnomapping, the research team took a wide range
of information from oral histories, focus groups, historical documents, and
socio-economic and demographic data, and generated five kinds of maps.
The first described the customs of Tuara in relation to land and its incorporation into their cosmovisin. The second is a map of specific land areas
claimed. The third is a map of zones of common use for hunting, fishing,
and gathering shared with other communities. The fourth map documents
the overlaps of Tuara traditional territory with those of other communities.
The fifth and last map locates the presence of mestizo immigrants and others
without titles in the areas claimed by Tuara.
The mapping project reveals key differences in the way that Nicaragua
national law conceives of territories versus how they have actually been constructed and lived in by the Miskitu of Tuara and other indigenous groups.
The land titles call for the resolution of conflicts with the state, with third
parties, and with neighboring communities. Traditionally, and even currently,
the people of Tuara do not operate with the notion of an exclusive territory.
Rather, there are overlapping realms of territory used for hunting, fishing,
gathering, and other areas of resources shared with other communities. For
Tuara community members, territory is not exclusive, but shared in different
ways with adjacent communities, in ways that vary over time.
Ncleo de Histria Indgena e do Indigenismo de la Universidade de So
Paolo (Nucleus of Indigenous History and Indigenism at the University of So
Paolo, NHIIUSP), Programa Wajpi del Instituto de Pesquisa e Formao
em Educao Indgena (Wajpi program of the Institute for Research and
Training in Indigenous Education, PWIEPE), and Conselho das Aldeias
Wajpi (the Counsel of Wajpi Communities, Apina) engaged in a project
that trained a generation of young Wajpi researchers to document the diversity of local histories and knowledges, develop Wajpi models of knowledge
production, and compare these to Western epistemologies found in diverse
disciplines from anthropology to biology. Wajpi community leaders have
been motivated for some time to validate their own cultural knowledge and
traditional practices as they have watched Wajpi youth value non-indigenous
Introduction
13
practices and knowledges more than those of the Wajpi. The project that the
research team conceptualized for Otros Saberes builds on an ongoing Wajpi
movement to create their curriculum in Wajpi schools so that each youth
can know and value the diversity of what might loosely be called Wajpi
culture (a term defined below) and be able to know how it is linked to their
territory. The Wajpi have a legally titled territorial base of 607,000 hectares
with forty-nine hamlets settled within it. Although gaining territorial recognition is important, like many indigenous groups in Brazil, the Wajpi are
still considered tutelados, or wards of the state. This subordinate status has
continued many peoples view of indigenous peoples as needing to be cared
for and makes it difficult for young indigenous people to achieve respect
and political and cultural affirmationboth from non-indigenous peoples
and for themselves.
Building on a past project begun in 1998 to train indigenous teachers,
this Otros Saberes research involves ten bilingual teachers, twenty teachers in
training, twenty young indigenous researchers in training, and fifty other students. Some project participants, such as the indigenous bilingual teachers,
are interested in comparing the knowledge of whites about Indians and the
knowledge that Indians have about themselves that whites do not have. In
addition to actually conducting a graphic and oral inventory of a wide range
of Wajpi knowledge and information, project participants also interrogated
different forms of knowledge transmission, such as oral versus written, and
explored the differences between anthropological investigations, linguistics,
biology, evangelical missionary research, government officials investigations,
and Wajpi forms of knowing.
A group of young Wajpi researchers is developing ethnographic registers, systematizing their observations and visual and oral information gathering, and comparing, revising, and synthesizing that information. The Wajpi
see the educators from the NGOs and anthropologists as facilitators for this
project.
Each member of the Wajpi research team has chosen a particular area
of knowledge to inventory. The researchers each explored specific routes to
the knowledge area they seek including dreaming, being a shaman or curer
(paj), listening, reading, and paying attention to signs that indicate good
and bad spirits. The areas of knowledge are wide ranging and include knowledge of natural reserves, ways of classifying plants and animals, knowledge
about controlling pests, manioc research, research on different kinds of trees
and fruits, and knowledge of which wood is durable and useful in housing construction. Other projects explore themes in social relations such as
polygamous marriages, ways of responding to fathers-in-law, ways of speaking beautifully, and Wajpi theories about the world. Many of the individual
14

research projects have focused on curing and medicinal knowledge, such

as recipes to cure snake bites, tooth pain, stomach pain, machete cuts, and
spider and scorpion bites and medicine that protects people from the owners of the forest, such as the jaguar, and the owner of the water, the water
boa. Other research is related to how girls turn into women, first menstruation, body painting, and signs indicating the arrival of the ancestors, such as
through the ways that toucans sing and insect flight patterns.
In collecting such a wide range of information from different locations,
the Wajpi researchers came to the conclusion that there is no unified Wajpi
culture. The very concept of culture is something that the researchers
debated, and rather than a list of objects, histories, and institutions, they
came up with a very different definition. Through their research they came
to define culture as an assemblage of skills, to do, explain, think, say, and
represent. The researchers have come through the process of recording and
comparing different versions of the knowledges related to their theme without trying to generalize. In the collective process of exchanging and comparing the knowledges they have collected, the researchers worked against
overly synthesizing their findings to produce a definitive version of knowledge about a specific theme. Instead they sought to pull out native categories
and classifications that could accommodate difference. The research practice
itself is also reinscribing the importance of traditional community agents,
such as men and women treated as jovijagwera or elders whom young people
are re-learning to respect as the knowledge experts in their hamlets. Another
important result of the research process has been the fortifying of intergenerational relationships as young Wajpi researchers and their projects have
created new forums for dialogue between young and old.
Comparative Findings
Viewed together, these projects offer important crosscutting findings related
to four analytic themes with both theoretical and strategic implications.
Visibility. Establishing presence and visibility is basic to staking any type
of claim or demanding specific rights related to land and territory occupation, legal demarcation, recognition and legitimating of language, culture,
ethnicity, and other ethnic rights. Being seen or becoming visible was
at least one of the impetuses for a majority of these projects. Often visibility
was an initial goal for all of these projects in terms of national discourses of
race and ethnicity that have denied Afro-descendant or indigenous identities, whitened such identities through national projects of racial blending via
concepts such as mestizaje, or promulgated ideologies of racial democracy as
in Brazil and Puerto Rico. Complicating, challenging, and pushing back on
Introduction
15
these ideologies has been one underlying purpose of many of the projects.
The oral histories carried out in Aguadilla and Hormigueros resulted in making AfroPuerto Ricans visible and also in validating the complexities and
differences found among the experiences and understandings of AfroPuerto
Ricans. In Colombia, the PCNs project of interrogating the mechanics of
how Afro-Colombians are counted in the national census and which terms
are included in such a count resulted in a very different concrete number,
which increased the statistical visibility of Afro-Colombians from 1993 to
2005 by almost 9 percent. The PCNs additional work pointing out how even
the 2005 census count underestimated the Afro-Colombian population by
8 to 10 percent is an additional statistic of visibility that the PCN is using
for public policy and services which consider the needs of the large number
of Afro-Colombians driven from their territories by violence and living in
poverty in Colombias cities. In the case of both of these projects, the result
of increased visibility for Afro-descendants also renders more complex ideas
about nationalism, Colombianness, and Puerto Ricanness.
A second form of working for strategic visibility can be seen in the FIOB
project where women and young people are pushing on leaders to recognize more than one model of leadership and to see how the inter-linked
hierarchies of gender and ethnicity in larger Mexico impact the treatment of
women within the organization and can limit their potential participation.
That struggle for visibility is to re-educate the entire organization about how
women and youth can be invisible in the leadership structure and aims to
share knowledge and create spaces of collective learning where gender and
generational issues are seen, discussed, and acted upon strategically within
the organization. Within the Wajpi project, a different struggle for the strategic visibility of generational difference has been manifested through young
Wajpi investigators helping to make visible the knowledge and contributions of elders to a younger generation and in the process recentering and
making visible very specific areas of Wajpi knowledge that are only known
within the indigenous world. This is a project of internal visibilitymaking
things Wajpi visible within Wajpi communities.
Mapping Territoriality. Staking material claims such as land rights often
involves geographic mapping and boundary marking, as demonstrated in the
cases of Tuara, the PCN of Colombia, the Afro-descendant communities in
Esmeraldas and La Chota, Ecuador, and the Wajpi of Brazil. In each of these
cases, the term mapping has a much wider significance than geographic
mapping and boundary marking. The social mapping of ethnic relations, local
knowledges of the environment, historical mapping of the paths of the ancestors, and the mapping of cosmovisiones that link natural and human relations are
often important precursors to and accompaniments to geographic mapping.
16

Social mapping that employs locally based epistemologies and knowledges

as the basis for collecting information is a shared methodology that also has
produced theoretical continuities between several of the cases here.
Locally situated knowledges that are not broken apart into disciplinary divisions, such as the biology of plant life, the zoology of animal life,
the anthropology of human relations, and the cosmology of religion, can be
mapped as an integrated whole that forms part of the territorial spaces that
people live in and, in the case of the PCN and the Tuara, seeks to reclaim and
physically demarcate as well. The concept of territory as articulated by the
PCN, the Nicaraguan indigenous community of Tuara, the Afro-descendant
communities of Esmeraldas and La Chota, and the Wajpi research team is
a theoretical and strategic concept that avoids dichotomies between human
relations and nature, between religion and environment, and between the
material, spiritual, and symbolic worlds. Mapping a territory thus goes far
beyond a one-dimensional geographical demarcation and documentation
to suggest a multidimensional understanding of integrated layers of knowledge that work together within a geographic space identified collectively by
a group of people as being their space for living.
Coloniality and Decolonizing Epistemologies. Colonial racial and ethnic hierarchies that get reproduced in discourses of nationalism are often
imported into academic knowledge and models about Afro-descendant and
indigenous peoples. An important part of decolonizing knowledge has to do
with documenting historically and currently the variations and distinctions
found among Afro-descendant and indigenous peoples through time and
looking at local representations of difference in relation to national myths of
racial democracy or unified national racial and ethnic identities as discussed
above in relation to the project of visibility. Once local and regional histories
are gathered, the second step in decolonizing dominant models is to ensure
the dissemination of locally based knowledges back to their communities of
origin, as well as to the academy and other institutions that have helped to
create official policy and discourses about Afro-descendant and indigenous
peoples.
All of the Otros Saberes projects have taken steps in the decolonization
of knowledge through recentering indigenous and Afro-descendant systems
of knowledge, epistemologies, models of leadership, and understandings
of the world. The work that the Wajpi researchers are doing, by creating
inventories of Wajpi knowledges around specific themes and the specific
ways of learning and teaching (dreaming, listening, visions, watching, and
so forth) and the models used to do so, does not stop with validating specifically Wajpi ways of knowing. This project takes these findings and compares them to non-indigenous knowledge about indigenous people as well
Introduction
17
as the models used for classifying that information. It is in this comparison

of different ways of organizing information that the Wajpi are carrying the
project of decolonizing knowledge to a deeper level. A critical engagement
with modern disciplines and forms of knowledge production by introducing
the alternative possibilities that are seen through Wajpi knowledge systems
offers a way into what some have called border thinking (Mignolo 2000) or
transmodernity (Dussel 1995; Escobar 2004; Grosfoguel 2008). As pointed
out by the Afro-descendant research team from Ecuador, part of the object
of decolonizing knowledge is to contaminate closed forms of hegemonic
knowledge production so that they can be in dialogue with other knowledge
forms and systems. Situated knowledges that document the specifics and
variations of knowledge found at the local level, even from family to family,
are important initiatives for departing from a universal, overly rational position. If it is possible to establish a dialogue between the Western academic
epistemic tradition and indigenous and Afro-descendant systems of knowledge, then it needs to involve a two-way exchange and interrogation of all of
the models involveda process undertaken by the Wajpi researchers and
most likely others engaged in Otros Saberes projects.
Personal Discovery, New Identities, Leadership Development. The process
of carrying out collaborative research on themes that are intimately linked to
the personal histories and experiences of the researchers can result in processes of personal and social transformation and inspiration. Deeply interrogating national and regional histories and listening to a wide range of
experiences and ideas about race, ethnicity, and local forms of knowledge
and understanding both affirm and challenge the identities of indigenous and
Afro-descendant researchers. This process can also result in the consolidation
of shared political identities and the strengthening of shared political projects. In the process of collecting information generated from questions that
are strategic to the future of particular communities, organizations, or movements, individual researchers often come to see themselves in a different
lightperhaps reaffirming or awakening facets of their ethnic or racial identity; and they gain new personal and shared motivation to change the conditions that led to the invisibility of black and indigenous peoples. In cases
where research has uncovered and highlighted differences between families,
gender, and generations, such experiences can also generate new leaders or
strengthen existing leaders as they learn more from their research about how
larger structural conditions, histories, and complex links between racial, ethnic, gender, and generational power differences function in the world around
them as well as within their organizations and communities.
Researchers participating in the Afro-descendant oral history project in
Puerto Rico departed from the usual course of focusing on the findings and
18

instead found themselves being transformed by the process of engaging in

research. Students who did not identify as Afro-descendant found their selfidentities remade and moved in new directions as they collected and processed
oral histories. Rather than learning from professors, they came to see themselves
as being taught by those who shared their complex memories and experiences
about race, marginality, and the contradictory messages about blackness in
Puerto Rico. Young Wajpi researchers began constructing not only a general
definition of culture, but also of specific past and current variations of Wajpi
culture and of themselves within it as identified with the new subject position
of researchernot a traditional category in their communities.
Within the FIOB research project, understandings of how gender and
generational inequalities outside of the organization affected the experiences
of women and youth in the organization also resulted in recognition of a
range of leadership styles. Local communitarian leaders who were seldom at
the top of the organization were recognized as making significant contributions in terms of the range of topics they introduced as well as for the effectiveness of their network-based power of convocation. These insights could
potentially transform how leadership is understood and generate a broader
understanding and appreciation of different leadership styles that could complement one another.
Contributions of Collaborative Methods

The minimal entry-level criterion for selection of the six funded Otros Saberes
projects sounds deceptively simple: that the question or problem under consideration be determined primarily by the civil society organization. This
criterion in reality becomes charged and complex for two reasons. First, in
conventional research methods the definition of the research topicand, by
extension, the determination that the topic in question is worthy of study
has been the exclusive prerogative of scholars and their research communities. To displace the responsibility for this opening task from the community
of scholars to an organization or movement with explicit political objectives
is to devolve power and control from the academy to civil society protagonists. The second complexity follows: although this criterion does require
academy-based participants in the collaborative research team to devolve a
substantial quota of power and control, they do not (or at least, in our view,
should not) submit completely to the research agenda that their civil society counterparts establish. Instead, this determination should emerge from
a horizontal dialogue between differently positioned participants, each with
something crucial to contribute, leading to substantial overlap, but rarely
complete convergence, between the two. The tensions inherent to this
Introduction
19
differential positioning, and to the co-existence of two overlapping but distinct sets of research goals, should be cause not for despair or regret but
rather for transparent reflection and analysis.
Once this basic principle of dialogic determination of the research topic
is achieved, subsequent phases of the process follow directly as extensions
of that same principle. Civil society and academy-based intellectuals work
together on each facet of the research, from data collection, to interpretation of the results, to elaboration of the final products, to dissemination of
these results in diverse settings and venues. Collaboration in each of these
phases of the research does not mean, however, that responsibilities fall symmetrically on all those involved. To offer one example from the dissemination phase: civil society intellectuals are apt to play a more central role in the
presentation of research findings in the realm of politics and public policy,
whereas the academy-based participants generally took the lead in drafting
the chapters that appear in this book. The operative principles of collaboration are not symmetry, but rather transparency, horizontal dialogue, and
differential division of labor, in recognition of the distinctive strengths and
potential contributions of each. As in the initial determination of the research
topic, the expectation is not that work in these subsequent phases would ever
be tension-free, but rather that the tensions, once identified and engaged,
would be constructive.
A central objective of the Otros Saberes Initiative was to subject this
ideal model of collaborative research to critical scrutiny, drawing on the
experiences of the six teams. As Perry and Rappaport argue at length in the
following chapter, the six research experiences certainly did have their share
of tensions, as the general proposition suggests would be the case. Hierarchies
between academy and civil society intellectuals did not melt away with the
entry-level commitment to collaboration; in each of the teams, most explicitly in the PCN (Colombia) and Manos Unidas (Ecuador) experiences, these
tensions became the focus of discussion.6 Especially when the topic involved
turning the lens inward, toward the organization itself, the research process
brought tensions to the fore. The case of FIOB is illustrative: a study of gender inequities and gender empowerment within the organization could be
expected to generate a certain amount of debate and even dissent from those
who hold disproportionate gendered power; at the same time, it speaks very
well for the FIOB that it was able to endorse this critical dialogue, which surely
will be ongoing. A third general source of tension came from the explicitly
political goals of the topic in relation to the more broadly conceived research
agenda. The best example here is the URACCAN-Tuara research project: on
the one hand, the indigenous and Afro-descendant land rights law (known as
Law 445) stipulates specific research procedures to be followed if the results
20

are to be useful in the appeal for legal recognition of community lands; on

the other hand, the topic has many important dimensions that reach beyond
these constrained parameters (including critical reflection on the parameters
themselves). Beyond the need to mediate these two distinct mandates of collaborative research, in every case the political nature of the research goals
and process introduced complexities that the teams had to navigate: How
do we mobilize social science research in support of indigenous and Afrodescendant empowerment while preventing political pressuresat times
immediate and intensefrom disfiguring or derailing the research process?
Although there is no simple or single way forward in the face of these
challenges, we do contend that when researchers engage them directly and
reflexively the result is a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the
topic at hand. To some degree, this assertion can be substantiated by scrutiny of its corollary: research that does not reflect on its own political conditions and context is apt to lack this sophistication. In part this corollary has
become conventional wisdom in anthropology in response to impetus from
general challenges to ethnographic authority (Clifford 1988), feminist theory
(Behar and Gordon 1995), critical race theory (Collins 2000), and various
strands of post-structuralism. In part, however, the argument goes further,
focusing on how conventional research methods have political implications
that often go overlooked, even among those who pay attention to positionality, ethnographic authority, politics of knowledge, and the like. To subject the
decision on the research topic to a horizontal dialogue with protagonists, for
example, generates a flow of insight that would be very difficult to achieve by
other means: What research problems do they consider to be important and
why? What knowledge do they have about the topic under consideration,
and what remains unknown? This methodological dimensioncreating the
conditions for protagonists to assert their knowledge, analysis, and political
judgment at each stage of the processin turn forms the centerpiece of the
Otros Saberes innovation.
The fruits of this innovation are immediately evident at the level of
descriptive understanding and strategic analysis. In the first instance, these
advantages accrue from the simple principles of access and motivation. Given
that Otros Saberes team members form part of the communities that are subjects of study, and given that the civil society organizations played a major
role in determining the topics, access to the research subjects is generally not
a problem, and motivation to participate tends to be high. While present in
all six projects, these advantages were especially strong in the AfroPuerto
Rican and Afro-Ecuadorean topics. Basic questions of racial identity in the
former and key elements of Afro-Ecuadorean cosmovisin in the latter could
possibly have been tapped by outside researchers. But the confidence that
Introduction
21
the AfroPuerto Ricans evidently felt in talking about how they were affected
personally by ideologies of blanqueamiento (whitening), for example, was certainly enhanced by the fact that the researchers themselves were AfroPuerto
Ricans who placed themselves in the same story that they were asking others to recount. An even stronger version of this argument applies in the case
of political strategies of the organizations under consideration. It is simply
inconceivable that the FIOB would have agreed to an internal analysis of
gender relations or that Tuara community leaders would have shared the
charged and confidential details of their community land rights claims had
the research team not incorporated members from those very organizations
with clear lines of accountability established from the outset.
However important these more pragmatic advantages of access and motivation, they are surpassed by other advantages in the realm of theoretical innovation and epistemological challenge. Theoretical innovation emerges from
collaborative research methods because of the special proximity between political struggle and data gathering, or more broadly, the production of knowledge.
The PCNs struggle around issues of recognition, census categories, and racial
inequality is an excellent case in point. Prevailing definitions of blackness in
Colombia (like many places in Latin America) resulted in systematic underestimation of the numbers of Afro-Colombians, which in turn, undermined their
claims for rights and made it difficult to demonstrate the relationship between
racial hierarchy and social inequality. This political struggle placed PCN at the
crux of a conceptual problem: What is the relationship between racial subject formation (whereby racial hierarchies are constituted and justified) and
the collective racial self-making (whereby racially subordinated peoples name
themselves, claim rights, and seek to achieve them)? Given their own political
struggles against invisibility, PCN intellectuals were well-positioned to criticize facile notions of racial self-making, which ignore the pervasive influence
of subject formation, and to argue that Afro-Colombians collective assertion
had to emerge from the categories that these subject formation processes put
in place. The concrete achievement of this strugglean impressive increase in
the recognized numbers of Afro-Colombiansalso reinforced the conceptual
finding, which understands collective racial assertion as emerging from and
grappling with the very hegemonic categories that it contests.
Finally, and more important still, is the close connection between collaborative research and epistemological challenge. The name of the Initiative
Otros Saberesis a direct allusion to this contribution. The assertion is that
intellectuals who are directly engaged in struggles for collective empowerment, especially when the collective in question embodies cultural difference, have the potential to produce knowledge in forms that do not fit within
standard, Western knowledge categories. It is crucial here to avoid both
22

idealization and overreach. All of the advantages mentioned in the previous

two paragraphs accrue within a basically Western social science framework
and are of great importance for precisely that reason. Moreover, for some
time in indigenous studies, and more recently in Afro-descendant studies as
well, there has been a tendency to press cosmovisin into service as an allencompassing filter that converts every utterance and practice into quintessential expressions of contestation of the West through an idiom of radical
cultural difference. We prefer a much more restricted and rigorous notion of
epistemological challenge, grounded in two basic questions: How does direct
defiance of the subject-object dichotomy change the way that we study our
research topic? When indigenous and Afro-descendant researchers replace
Western premises embedded in the research process with their own, what
new forms of knowledge on the topic result?
All six projects, in different ways, produced results that meet the first criterion. With actors themselves serving as intellectual leaders of the research processes, the subject-object dichotomy so prominent in conventional research
assumes a much less central role, even if it does not (and could not) completely
fade away. This is especially the case when the topic is identity formation, such
as in the PCN and AfroPuerto Rico research projects, and the researchers
themselves are involved in reflexive and transformative processes along these
same lines. It would not be at all surprising to find, for example, that the predominance of self-identification as black is much greater in the Otros Saberes
Initiative than other researchers have found. This, in turn, could well be attributed to the generative conditions that the research process itself produced. Full
scrutiny of the second criteria is beyond the scope of this introduction because
it involves complex and multifaceted processes that are still underway and
therefore cannot be reported on in detail in each teams research findings. We
found preliminary expressions of this epistemological contribution in each of
the studies, perhaps most strikingly in that of the Wajpi, in which collaborative research led to a vigorous critique of inherited anthropological notions
of culture replaced by an understanding that is ostensibly more practical
an assemblage of skills, to do, explain, think, say, and representbut could
actually call into question the very roots of Western traditions of anthropological representation. This is the great promise of collaborative research across
boundaries of cultural difference: to challenge the slippage between representation as portrayal and representation as speaking for.
Knowledge Validation Processes in Otros Saberes

Whereas traditional academic knowledge is validated through peer reviews
that consist of academically credentialed experts certifying the research
Introduction
23
results of other academically credentialed experts, the validation of the specific knowledges and models for knowing associated with the Otros Saberes
research projects occurred in hybrid ways. Part of the distinctiveness of the
knowledge validation processes is related to the rootedness of the knowledge forms research teams documented in daily living. Although modernist
models of education rely on experts who acquire their knowledge through
studying texts and engaging in scientific experimentation, knowledge produced through daily life is organized, taught, and learned through meaningful daily social relations that are basic to the human condition. Medicinal
knowledge; understandings of place, territory, and the creatures (human and
non-human) and plants that inhabit it; material knowledge of hunting, fishing, farming, gathering, house-building, and other essential tasks; knowledge of how to move through the stages of life from birth to death; religious
and ritual understandingsall of these knowledge forms are experienced,
learned, and taught by doing, listening, observation of elders, and active
solicitation in inter-generational contexts. The ways in which this knowledge
is generated also affects how it is validated.
In the projects described here, validation is partially achieved through
vetting, discussion, and feedback from the communities and organizations
involved. This form of validation may be closer to what many are familiar
with in terms of political validation of knowledge rather than academic validation. While several projects acknowledge the expertise of elders as sources
of information that others may not have, elders are not seen as the sole
experts or peer reviewers for the information generated by the research.
In the case of the Wajpi researchers, the team of indigenous researchers
exchanged, shared, and discussed their findings not only with one another
but also with indigenous teachers, students, and community members. An
important measure for this research team in validating their findings was to
be self-critical of any results that tended to produce highly synthesized and
homogenous versions of culture related to any specific theme. Variation of
results was encouraged and validated.
Within the FIOB research project, validation of the information generated
by the project was carried out by internal discussions of the research team
where important differences were noted between the one male member and
the three female members. Rather than agree upon one version of what they
found, the team agreed to publish multiple interpretations of their findings.
In addition, academic and activist researchers acknowledged that they had
different political stakes and ways of identifying with the FIOB that affected
the research, their approach to it, and ultimately the way it was validated. By
negotiating a process whereby differential interpretations could co-exist, the
researchers could be unified in their validation of what they found but have
24

their differences represented. Through a different process than the Wajpi

researchers, the FIOB researchers found that allowing variation in the results
was an important part of the validation process.
In the case of the PCN, the results of the projectlike the initial objectiveswere constantly related to the overall strategic and political objectives
of the organization. Important parts of the validation process included discussions of the applicability of the results to the strategic political agenda of
the organizationability to affect national development and policy discussions about Afro-descendant communities in Colombia and to maintain and
protect the territories of Afro-Colombian communities. In the case of the
Tuara research, validation came in part through the results that the maps
and information generated. That is, Tuara community members affirmed the
maps generated by the project as accurate representations of their claims.
This constitutes an important form of validation, even if the specific requirements for legal recognition of Tuara territory boundaries in relation to other
communities make it unlikely that the land claims will ultimately be recognized in their current form. In the cases of the Afro-descendant oral history
project in Puerto Rico and the birthing and medicinal knowledges documented in the Afro-descendant communities of Esmeraldas and La Chota
in Ecuador, the validation processes are largely found in community discussions and forums where the research results were shared, processed, and then
reproduced to be distributed to a wider circle of people. In all of the cases,
the agreed upon forms of reproduction and dissemination of the knowledge
generated constituted another form of validation through agreement on the
content of videos, audio recordings, books, folders, public displays, or other
forms of presentation.
Dissemination and Political Impact

As stated earlier in this introduction, we believe that discussions of the political impact of the Otros Saberes research projects are best held in venues
other than academic publications like this one. This is not because we do
not view these topics as important; to the contrary, they are crucial, indeed
in the long run probably the most compelling rationale to support and carry
out this kind of research. This is also not because we endorse the traditional
dichotomy between scholarship and politics; to the contrary, a founding
premise of the Otros Saberes Initiative is, precisely, that scholarly work is
inherently political, in institutional and practical terms, and that there is an
urgent need to challenge and broaden the traditional political underpinnings
of Latin American studies. Rather, the reason for limiting the discussion of
political impact in this volume is that an academic book does not provide the
Introduction
25
conditions for discernment of these matters. The authors of this introduction

are located in academic positions, far from settings where the research took
place, drawing mainly on the written documents that the research produced.
Discernment of political impact would require us (or someone) to be in those
places, following these complex and multifaceted political processes, and
then making some kind of judgment about what difference the research made
in each case. The protagonists themselves must constantly make these judgments, and in accordance with the results, they either continue to participate
in collaborative research or not. Meanwhile, our principal job in this volume
is to make the case and the space for this kind of research within scholarly
institutions such as LASA.
This being said, it is possible to note in very general terms some of the
political effects of the research and its dissemination. Each of the six projects
generated research products with goals of direct political usefulness in mind;
indeed these goals were front-and-center in the research from the start. These
products varied widely, from educational materials (written, radio, video), to
discrete tools (e.g., maps, censuses), to broader analytical insights with specific strategic usefulness. It would be difficult, and in some cases nonsensical,
to try to determine the impact of these products, because in each case they
form part of broader, multifaceted flows of intellectual activity and political
work. Yet as the contents of these chapters attest, the presence of academybased researchers in the teams, the institutional backing of LASA, and the
opportunity for interaction and enrichment that the LASA Congress provided, all contributed to the deepening and amplification of the outcomes.
These are intangibles, of course, but nonetheless very important.
Some more tangible results can also be noted. In response to findings
of the Otros Saberes research, for example, the FIOB is forming leadership
schools for women that will take into account regional variations in gender
roles. The curriculum of the leadership schools will work from the specific
context in which ethnic, gender, and generational inequalities are played out
in different geographical locations where the organization functions. The
schools will train women and youth in local specifics as well as in the skills
defined as a part of extra-local political leadership. The change in Colombian
census categories, which the PCN Otros Saberes research helped to achieve,
is also an especially noteworthy example of direct political impact. It would
require additional research to tease apart the impact of the research, per se,
in relation to straightforward political critique and mobilization. But clearly,
both the content of the research results and the legitimacy that comes from
the involvement of university-based scholars clearly did make a difference.
Finally, the most important political impact of these six research projects
liesto return to the intangiblein the generation of ideas that empower.
26

One need only reflect, one last time, on the central topics of the six to
appreciate this point: contesting the controlling idea of racial democracy
in Puerto Rico and affirming AfroPuerto Rican identity; challenging the
invisibility of Afro-Colombians in the national census; documenting specific
expressions of Afro-Ecuadoran culture and identity; establishing the basis
for a Miskitu Indian communitys claims to territorial rights; probing gender
and generational hierarchies inside an indigenous organization; creating the
base for autonomous education and intellectual empowerment within indigenous communities. These are all crucial aspirations for indigenous and Afrodescendant movements in contemporary times, and although the objective is
certainly much too large to be adequately addressed through a single project,
it should be a source of great satisfaction for LASA to have supported research
that is grappling with such difficult and weighty topics. We trust that you will
agree, after reading the chapters, that the activist-intellectual lead authors are
already at the forefront of efforts to bring about collective conceptual and
political empowerment. We hope that the publication of this volume will
help make these efforts more widely known and contribute to their efficacy.
Challenges That Lie Ahead

The six Otros Saberes projects highlighted here represent a two-year process
of: (1) collaborative agenda setting and proposal writing between indigenous
and Afro-descendant activists, community members, and academic researchers; (2) months of collecting information on agreed-upon themes and topics through social mapping, focus groups, interviews, archival research,
photographing, video-taping, audio-taping of events and exchanges, and
open-ended discussions and observation; (3) exchange and processing of
information not only within the research teams but also within wider communities and organizations; (4) creation of products such as videos, audiotapes,
folders, displays, reports, books, written oral histories, and photographs; and
(5) distribution of these products and other results among the participating organizations, as well as in interested communities and in wider academic, political, and policy circles. The process of producing Otros Saberes
has involved specific strategic, political, and cultural efforts on the part of
the organizations and communities involved as well as producing theoretical
insights that transcend the specific contexts in which the information was
generated.
Research projects that stem from specific political and cultural commitments tend to produce results that question academic conventions, both in
content and in form. Rather than producing one unified set of findings, most
projects tended to document variation in findings according to particular
Introduction
27
themes. Large areas of knowledge inquiry such as: spiritual/medicinal curing; the study of territories and their systems of knowledge; the rewriting
of nationalist ideologies of homogeneity to include the specificities of indigenous cultures and forms of blackness in their variation and complexity; the
study of paths to knowledge that include dreaming, shamanism, the reading
of signs from animals and plants, listening, watching, and practicing versus texts; theories of different forms of political leadership; and the ways
that gender and generational inequality influence social movement structuresall of these findings suggest that it is possible to work between the
tension of politically motivated research and broader theoretical inquiry. The
subsequent challenge comes in seeing how these two goals can be put into
practice in the educational, political, and policy settings. How do we move
the specifics of a wider notion of health and curing into the educational curriculum for a wide range of children? How do we establish an integrated
model of territory that includes human, plant, natural, and spiritual relations
in development policy at regional, national, and international levels? How
do we assure that what some have called the relational ontologies of Afrodescendant and indigenous peoples, such as those illustrated here, avoid the
dualisms of nature/culture, individual/community, material/spiritual and are
taken seriously as part of state and transnational discussions on sustainability
(Escobar 2009:5)? How do we broaden our cultural and political definitions
of expertise to include knowledge producers who are credentialed by their
communities and organizations and not only by universities? As many of the
projects have suggested, to begin down the road of decolonizing knowledge
we have to return to the questions of who identifies the research questions,
who collects information and how, who receives it, how it is used, and who
is invited to come to the table to apply and implement the knowledge
gained. Both the specific kinds of information generated by the Otros Saberes
projects and the epistemological models that emerged through the mechanism of collaborative research suggest that these projects have much to offer.
What remains to be seen is if there is a sufficient juxtaposition of significant
political forces at local, regional, national, and global levels to provide an
opening for Otros Saberes to come to the table.
Notes
1. This argument is borrowed liberally from Re-visioning Latin American Studies by Sonia
Alvarez, Arturo Arias, and Charles R. Hale (2011).
2. While the class dimension of this problem received attention early on in many realms
of Latin American studies, gender came much later, whereas the realms of race, sexuality, and
perhaps spatiality are still intellectual battlegrounds.
3. Harvard Universitys Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies pledged $20,000 to
support the post-Congress workshop, which originally was planned to be held in Boston. When
28

the LASA EC decided to relocate the Congress to Montreal, in response to discriminatory practices
of US government visa policies, Harvard graciously agreed to honor their commitment in support
of the workshop.
4. The academybased committee members were: Alcida Rita Ramos (Universidade de
Braslia, Brazil), Eduardo Restrepo (Universidad Javeriana, Colombia), Lynn Stephen (University
of Oregon, United States), and Eva Thorne (Brandeis University, United States); the civil society
based members were Miriam Miranda (OFRANEH, Honduras), and Candace Craig (Jamaica).
Charles Hale served as non-voting coordinator of the selection meeting.
5. The other two areas of focus were (1) to continue evaluating the specific areas of knowledge and strategies the PCN had developed for constructing and defending Afro-Colombian territories and the counterweights to these strategies such as national development projects, neoliberal
markets, and drug trafficking; and (2) the specific community-based organizational processes at a
collective and individual level that have been used to guarantee the permanence of territory and
have aided people in overcoming the social and psychological impact of ongoing violence and
conflict. These are not reported on here.
6. The contextual variable of how and to what extent the participants choose to make these
tensions public is of course crucial here. As project coordinators, we made a special point of
encouraging reportage on these deliberations, on the grounds that they are constructive and illuminating. We recognize, of course, that reportage of this sort can be delicate and at times it is best
kept out of public realm; although we strongly encourage disclosure, we respect the organizations
discernment on the details.
Introduction
29

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Charles R. Hale and Lynn Stephen

History of the Initiative

Charles R. Hale and Lynn Stephen

casesthe study of indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples is one prime

as well as from Harvard University,3 by the beginning of 2006 we had raised

Charles R. Hale and Lynn Stephen

collaborative research methods. A more elaborated version of this discussion

Charles R. Hale and Lynn Stephen

Charles R. Hale and Lynn Stephen

levels of Afro-Colombian populationBogota, Medellin, Cali, Cartagena,

where blackness was believed to be confined to the population that worked

Charles R. Hale and Lynn Stephen

Charles R. Hale and Lynn Stephen

the project in a meeting presided over by community authorities, religious

Charles R. Hale and Lynn Stephen

research projects have focused on curing and medicinal knowledge, such

Charles R. Hale and Lynn Stephen

Social mapping that employs locally based epistemologies and knowledges

as the models used for classifying that information. It is in this comparison

Charles R. Hale and Lynn Stephen

instead found themselves being transformed by the process of engaging in

Contributions of Collaborative Methods

Charles R. Hale and Lynn Stephen

are to be useful in the appeal for legal recognition of community lands; on

Charles R. Hale and Lynn Stephen

idealization and overreach. All of the advantages mentioned in the previous

Knowledge Validation Processes in Otros Saberes

Charles R. Hale and Lynn Stephen

their differences represented. Through a different process than the Wajpi

Dissemination and Political Impact

conditions for discernment of these matters. The authors of this introduction

Charles R. Hale and Lynn Stephen

Challenges That Lie Ahead

Charles R. Hale and Lynn Stephen

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